


stir it with a peppermint stick

by scioscribe



Category: Stranger Things (TV 2016)
Genre: Christmas Tree Farms, Fluff, Hot Chocolate, Multi, Mutual Pining, Post-Season/Series 02, Winter
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-19
Updated: 2020-04-19
Packaged: 2021-03-02 03:21:46
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,362
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23728231
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/scioscribe/pseuds/scioscribe
Summary: Steve, Nancy, and Jonathan all pick up a seasonal job at the local Christmas tree farm.  Steve blames the general surrealness of the place for the new, weird coziness the three of them have developed.
Relationships: Jonathan Byers/Steve Harrington/Nancy Wheeler
Comments: 14
Kudos: 145
Collections: Flash In The Pan: A Food Flash Exchange





	stir it with a peppermint stick

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Sholio](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Sholio/gifts).



“Well, this is scenic,” Steve said. He rubbed his hands together, causing snow to flake off his gloves.

“It is kind of like being in a calendar photo,” Nancy said, looking around. The tip of her nose had gone pink in the cold. “When it’s quiet, anyway. Only calendar photos aren’t _cold_.”

Jonathan trooped towards them through the snow. If the snow had made Nancy look elfin, it had made Jonathan look sort of yeti-ish: taller and broader through the shoulders against the frosted-white backdrop, prone to striding around with huge steps. Only he was the one with the camera. Bigfoot taking pictures of people wandering around in between the trees.

When he reached them, he said, “The Carmichaels want a tree. And they’ve got kids.”

“So much for scenic,” Nancy said.

Officially, they all had distinct and totally separate jobs at the Marshmallow World Christmas Tree Farm. Jonathan, who’d worked there for three winters already, was the assistant manager who also took the commemorative photos for the Auld Lang Syne wall inside the cabin. Nancy looked after the place’s one reindeer, a grumpy monster named Blitzen, and babysat the kids who were either too young to be trusted anywhere in the vicinity of axes and falling trees or too bratty to deal with the cold. Steve made trees fall via manly lumberjacking.

In practice, as long as the owner was off being sauced on his own eggnog (which was most of the time), they did whatever they wanted, which meant Jonathan assistant-managed nothing and took pictures not only of the families but also of whatever the hell else he felt like, Nancy swung an ax, and Steve kept the little kids busy making igloos and snow angels. And everybody stood around and let Blitzen glare at them dourly. Steve didn’t blame him for his bad mood. The poor guy kept getting garlands and poinsettia wreaths hung around him.

Nancy intercepted the Carmichaels at the gate, and Jonathan trailed back to the cabin with Steve and the Carmichael kids.

It didn’t take long to figure out that the two Carmichael kids were the bratty subtype, since they were definitely old enough to be slogging around with their parents. They were almost _Dustin’s_ age.

“So,” Steve said, “what do you guys want to do while your parents are out getting the tree?”

“Not be here,” Brenda Carmichael said, and her brother snickered.

“You _are_ here, though,” Steve said, “so you might as well do something.”

“Your sweater’s lame,” Ricky Carmichael said. “Snowmen are lame.”

The problem with dealing with kids _professionally_ , as opposed to just dealing with kids he liked, was that he couldn’t call these ones little shitheads.

Jonathan was supposed to be unable to help because he was double-checking the day’s take, but Steve was ninety percent sure he was just doing a crossword puzzle like a traitor; he’d had advanced notice to figure out the pain-in-the-ass the Carmichael kids were going to be. Still, he looked up at that and said mildly, “I like his sweater.”

“I like my sweater too,” Steve said, and he and Jonathan sort of grinned at each other across the room.

Nancy had bought the sweater. When Steve had pointed out that it was kind of unusual to give Christmas sweaters to your ex-boyfriend, she’d just said she’d given Jonathan one too. It’d been the first weird moment in a series of recent weird moments, the latest of which was this look he and Jonathan were sharing.

It was fine. It was just the general surrealness of having a holiday job at Marshmallow World, a place where your official job duties could include pretending a reindeer was talking to you—and having that job after a run of bloody showdowns with monsters. All of that was bound to disconnect you from reality a little, until you forgot where the lines were, exactly. That was all it was.

Brenda and Ricky seemed nonplussed by the fact that neither Steve nor Jonathan gave a shit what they thought of his sweater, and Steve was heartened by that. He rallied.

“Fudge?” he suggested. “Igloo? Obviously we’ve ruled out snowmen.”

The kids conferred for a second in shrill whispers Steve pretended he couldn’t hear, and then Brenda, the appointed spokesperson, said, “Igloo, but you’re not allowed inside.”

Fine by him. He agreed to play construction worker, and with a little wave at Jonathan, he went out and helped these subpar kids build an igloo. Usually, this was the part of the job he liked, because the little kids got so pumped about the possibilities that they started planning tunnel systems and tin-can phonelines that would let them talk to _other_ igloos. And then they overbalanced in their snowsuits and fell down spread-eagled like starfish, and Steve had to help them up. The Carmichaels refused to be entertaining, period, and aside from barking orders at him like tiny little foremen, ignored him completely. When their—shoddy, in Steve’s opinion—igloo was erected, they burrowed inside it and reiterated that he had to stay out.

“Cool,” Steve said. “I’ll just be out here making sure you guys don’t freeze to death.”

One of them blew a raspberry at him.

Awesome. And now he couldn’t even go back inside. If they’d chosen fudge, at least he could sit over by Jonathan and _be warm_.

He didn’t even have a book or anything. Usually, if there were kids, he was actually _doing_ something with them, not just being shunned by them because they didn’t like his dorky snowman sweater; if there was downtime, he usually had Nancy and/or Jonathan around. Maybe Jonathan would come out—but if he actually did have to get the books balanced for the day, probably not. It was getting close to twilight, and they didn’t stay open past dark until it was the week of Christmas. So basically, he was stuck with appreciating the freaking scenery again.

And thinking about Nancy and Jonathan. Actually, no, he was going to totally _not_ do that.

He’d promised to wrangle Dustin a tree for next to nothing, so the Party—he actually thought about them that way now, God help him—would be out here in a few days, and they’d probably set up camp in the cabin for a while to screw him out of a ton of fudge on his employee discount. Steve killed time tallying up a list of things he’d have to forbid them that they’d wind up doing anyway.

And then he went right back to Nancy and Jonathan again. Dammit.

The snow was turning pink and purple now as the sun went down. The Carmichaels must be picky as hell about their tree—

A snowball exploded in his face.

Oh, that was unfair. He couldn’t hit them back and the little shits knew it. He wiped snow out of his eyes.

“Good aim,” he said lightly. “But you’re not supposed to attack noncombatants.”

There was a giggle from inside the igloo, and then Brenda surfaced just long enough to peg him with another one—this one with enough ice packed into it to cut his forehead, because why not? He’d gotten his ass kicked by everything else this year, why not a snowball?

The kids popped back up again, groundhog-like, but apparently the sight of blood freaked them out, because they just stood there, ammo in hand, open-mouthed.

Steve dabbed at the cut with the sleeve of his coat. He looked at them, and something in his expression maybe implied that he’d faced down mutant dogs from hell with a nail-bat, because they dropped the snowballs.

“Sorry,” Brenda mumbled.

Steve sighed. “It’s fine. Just less ice next time, okay?”

“We didn’t mean to,” Ricky said, and Steve actually sort of believed him: he guessed they were just brats and not budding sociopaths out to disfigure him. If they had been, they would have used rocks.

He blotted the cut again. The bleeding was already stopping, so he used the last of it to take shameless advantage of their guilt to get them back inside, where he doled out the complimentary one-square-of-fudge-per-child and the fuck-it one-square-of-fudge-per-time-he-got-hit-in-the-face. Brenda and Ricky agreed to warm up by the first until their parents got back, so Steve just collapsed bonelessly into a chair next to Jonathan.

“You know you’re bleeding, right?” Jonathan said. He touched Steve’s forehead, his thumb just to the side of the cut.

It must have opened up again once he was out the cold, but that wasn’t what he was focusing on: he was stuck on Jonathan’s thumb grazing over him. There was no way in hell Jonathan couldn’t see that it was a nothing cut that wasn’t even worth a Band-Aid. He couldn’t really be worried, whatever the look in his eyes was. He was just—touching him.

Steve said, “Would you believe me if I said it was from something cool?”

Jonathan’s answer to that was thankfully interrupted by the Carmichaels’ return—Jonathan yanked his hand away from Steve’s face like he’d been touching a hot stove—and then it was just about seeing them off and closing up the farm for the day.

“Did they want a tree from the Arctic Circle or something?” Steve said to Nancy, as the two of them went to lock the main gate. “You were out there forever.”

Nancy double-checked that the parking lot was now officially free of all cars but theirs. “Honestly, I think they just wanted to get away from their kids for a while. Mike hates those two. Were they a handful?”

Steve weighed the pros and cons of telling a pretty girl that two snot-nosed kids had hit him in the face with a snowball and insulted his sweater; he couldn’t say it came out on _pro_. But then he told her anyway, because fuck it, this was Nancy. They told each other stuff now. He wasn’t trying to impress her, he was just… he just liked being _with_ her. He liked hanging out with his ex-girlfriend and his ex-girlfriend’s boyfriend, and just—who gave a shit if it was normal or not?

Besides, the story made her laugh.

They went back inside to close up the cabin, and they got greeted by the rising scent of hot chocolate.

This had become kind of a tradition—they wound the night down by sitting by the fire and drinking one last mug of hot chocolate together before they went home for the night. Before Steve went one way and Nancy and Jonathan went another. But now Jonathan was juggling not their usual mugs but the Styrofoam takeaway cups with the plastic lids, and he was already bundled up.

They were hitting the road early tonight, then. That was fine. They’d probably noticed that their nightly hot chocolate parties had started to get a little, well, cozy. Last time Nancy had wound up sitting on the rug, her back against Steve’s legs, and he’d found himself playing with the ends of her hair, silky-fine and still damp with snow, and Jonathan had just gone on talking about The Clash. Maybe, Steve had thought, Jonathan just didn’t care as long as he was the one who drove off with her at night, who probably parked with her somewhere before he took her home—but he didn’t think that was it. Especially not when he thought about Jonathan touching him.

So if they didn’t want to do hot chocolate night again, Steve couldn’t pretend he didn’t know why.

But then Jonathan just said, “I thought we could drink it outside. The sky’s really clear tonight.”

“Says the guy who’s spent half the day sitting inside,” Nancy said, but she was smiling.

They went outside and brushed as much snow off the picnic table as they could and sat down there, their feet on the benches, the cold still soaking straight through Steve’s jeans. Jonathan passed out first the chocolates and then, to Steve’s surprise, peppermint sticks sealed in plastic. The Marshmallow World gave out candy canes, but only the little ones, and these were monsters and straight besides.

“Thanks, Santa,” Steve said.

“I brought them from home,” Jonathan said, unruffled. “You stir the chocolate with it, it’s really good.”

“Sure, I’ve done this,” Nancy said. “It’s not like your thing about putting salt on ice cream.”

“Dude, you put salt on ice cream?”

“Try it sometime,” Jonathan said.

“Uh, no thanks.” But he pried the lid off the hot chocolate cup and dipped the peppermint stick in the creamy, frothy chocolate. He stirred it and, holding the peppermint off to the side like it was a straw, took a sip.

Okay. Jonathan was right. The peppermint had started melting into the chocolate, giving the whole cup a faint but awesome candy cane flavor, and it seemed to go freakishly well with Steve’s snowman sweater and Jonathan and Nancy next to him. The marshmallows bobbed along in the cup, soaking up the chocolate and dissolving into sweet, s’mores-like deliciousness. This was great hot chocolate. This was, like, _fated_ hot chocolate. He’d spent his whole life waiting for this hot chocolate.

Nancy tilted her head back. “Do either of you know the constellations?”

“I know the Big Dipper exists,” Steve said. She could still distract him from his love affair with the peppermint hot chocolate, and that was saying something.

“Orion,” Jonathan added. “Little Dipper.”

“But neither of you know where any of them are?”

“I can see the man in the moon,” Steve offered.

“I was just thinking it would be more romantic if we could…” She trailed off. Steve could see her breath puffing out and freezing in the air.

More romantic. The three of them.

He took a deep breath and pointed. “I think that’s the North Star.”

“Yeah?” Jonathan said quietly. “It’s pretty bright.”

Steve drank some more of the hot chocolate of courage. He said, “I think you’re right, Nance.” And he did, he really did. He liked thinking of the three of them huddled together under that sky.

“Look,” Nancy said, leaning against him. “I think that one’s the Big Dipper.”


End file.
